From Mike Wall at LiveScience:
Alien-life hunters should keep an open mind when scanning the atmospheres of exoplanets, a new study stresses.
The time-honored strategy of looking for oxygen is indeed a good one, study team members said; after all, it’s tough for this gas to build up in a planet’s atmosphere if life isn’t there churning it out.
“But we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket,” study lead author Joshua Krissansen-Totton, a doctoral student in Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement. More.
But there are no eggs. There is no basket. At this point, now that SETI itself is uncertain about even looking for intelligence as such, it is not clear what we are looking for or why. They now say that really good space alien technology would appear to be just nature. So why might not ET life forms appear to be just rocks?
See also: Are these stats for ET just “barking mad”?“Earth-sized” is not “Earth-like,” though the difference may confuse the NBC audience.
and
Rebranding SETI: They are now looking for inferior space alien technology. But why? SETI is trying to align its work with the growing conviction among naturalist atheists that consciousness and intelligence are illusions. SETI’s role will dwindle to simply denouncing ID. It will find donors. Too bad, but the SETIs chose that. Maybe the aliens are laughing now.